


Sigillum Diaboli

by KillNatalie



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Case Fic, Demon possession, Demons, Gen, M/M, Murder, Paranormal, Possession
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-08 04:49:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KillNatalie/pseuds/KillNatalie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock begins to question his sanity as he is plagued by the idea that he is being possessed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to create an amalgamation of everything I love, so here's a story about Sherlock, demons, madness, the occult, and Johnlock. All I can hope is that you don't hate it.

_"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."_

-John Milton, _Paradise Lost_

And so it began, when reason fell ill with a single drop of blood.

The sheets were cold, abandoned; a marble sculpture of stillness birthed into existence by the light of the moon’s expressionless face. To Sherlock their crumpled shapes looked like the jagged rocks of a vast, white desert where Moses would wander and stumble and scrape the soles of his Hebrew feet, drops of red swallowed by hungry sand. His face turned to the bathroom mirror, the light above his head so violent, so yellow, his pupils looked back like pinpricks of black infinity, pale, pale eyes like massive lakes of middle spring. Face gaunt, tired- had he been sleeping? –No, awake for days and days, a sojourn in Egypt- _no_ , he _was_ sleeping; he had awakened, and now the tips of his fingers were dipping into the pool of red on his hairline. A sliver of a wound. Had he always been bleeding?

He looked at his fingers, tipped with red, then back through the open door to the room as black as black, with nothing but that chalk bed visible under the moon. There was no blood there. White as lily. He suddenly envisioned that bed drenched with it, the blood from his skull, his head, the tiny cut beneath his dark hair, as if the sheets had been soaked in them. Sheets washed in a thick river of crimson. He wondered how that shrieking yellow light did not pierce into the darkness of the room. 

Sherlock looked back and oh, god, his face was a mask of it, his brain pumping big, fat torrents of blood through that cut in his head so that the slit bubbled and flapped like a vomiting mouth. His fingers grasped at it, and like a man removing a latex mask he tore away the flesh from his face. It came apart in his hands like raw dough- his eyelid, the exposed grin of his teeth, coming, coming, coming, his naked eye rolling in the socket, his open cheeks, white bone stained red. Oh, his tongue- his tongue ripped like ground meat beneath his fingernails, gums bright pink, and he was smashing it in the palm of his hand like soft snow, god, god, god. And like the yellow light swallowed by the blackness of his bedroom, he screamed and it was devoured by eternity and forever. 

“Sherlock?”

The voice came like an arrow. He stirred on the mattress. A stupid sound rumbled in his throat.

“What are you doing?” John’s footsteps approached and the sheet was pulled off of Sherlock’s back. He was instantly cold. “Get up and put your damn clothes on.”

Sherlock lazily grabbed a pillow and put his face into it. Through the fabric he muttered, “Why?”

John pulled the pillow away. “There’s a client here.”

He flipped over in the bed and cleared his throat of something thick and wet. “I…what day is it?” His eyes struggled against the light of the sun.

“Wednesday. It’s noon. I thought perhaps you had died.”

Sherlock swung his long legs over the side of his bed, elbows on his naked knees, the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes. “Remind me to get a new doctor.” Hair was sticking to his forehead. His voice was gruff. “Get their information, keep them occupied.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. 

Shoving his hands into his pockets, John sighed something that might have been, “Alright” and left, closing the door behind him. Sherlock steepled his fingers together and held them in front of his mouth, breathing gently against them through barely parted lips. The sun pressed tendrils of delicate heat to his arms and his legs, trapping itself in the thickness of his robe. John’s voice was pleasant through the walls. Sherlock touched his forehead and the fingers brought back nothing but sweat. 

  \- 

John leaned his body forward in his seat. There was a small leather journal on his lap that had recently replaced a blue and white notepad. John thought it looked thoughtful and professional. Sherlock thought he’d had the idea first when he started keeping a journal for note taking at university and that John was a great big copy-cat. Besides, his wasn’t even real leather anyway. Touching the end of his pen to his lips, John asked, “Ah, okay, can you tell him-” He pointed at Sherlock with the pen. “-what your problem is?” Apologetically, his features soft, he added, “If he doesn’t find it interesting he turns into an infant and refuses to help anyone.”

Sherlock was sitting cross-legged in his chair, looking like some sort of black stick insect, a praying mantis, with the dramatic bend of his knees and his thin hands folded, fingers interlocked against his mouth, eyebrows low and still and his shirt and trousers coal against his bleached bone skin. Without allowing the woman to speak at all, he asked abruptly, “How long ago did your husband die?” His eyes darted to John. “Yes, he’s dead, so you can flirt with her a little more obviously now.”

The woman jumped so violently at the sound of Sherlock’s voice that her tea leaped from the cup and into the saucer beneath it. She made a sound like a frightened terrier. Both her hands and her face were thin and aged, the largeness of her eyes and the smallness of her mouth making her resemble an old cat caught in the rain. Her hair was a faded red, like old blood on tissue paper. “Um…” she began.

“ _Um_ isn’t a year I’m familiar with, spit it out.”

John hissed Sherlock’s name and he ignored it. 

“My husband,” she said, her voice a barely audible coo, “he died almost two years ago. There was an aneurism in his brain.” She pointed briefly to her temple before seeming to catch herself and meekly return her hand to the handle of her cup. Sherlock thought this was one of the stupidest gestures he’d ever seen in his life. “But parts of him…they keep coming _back._ ” 

“You mean he left things behind for you, or…?” John inquired. 

Her eyes suddenly widened. “ _No!_ ” she exclaimed, setting the cup and saucer down on the table in front of her. The tea sloshed onto the wood, most of it missing the saucer entirely. “Parts of him…” She opened her purse and reached inside, pulling out what looked like a crumpled napkin in the cup of her palms. “…keep coming back!” Her hands unfolded. Inside the paper were the skeletal remains of a human finger. After nearly two years, the digit was entirely decomposed, leaving nothing but the bone and a tarp of dry, brown skin stretched tightly over what remained. The finger had been removed at the knuckle closest to the hand and curled in on itself like a dried leaf. Sherlock inhaled sharply and excitedly through his nose and plucked the fragment out of the woman’s hand, not even bothering with the paper. 

John made a startled choking sound. “Sherlock, you can’t just-!”

“Interesting,” he said, holding the extremity close to his face. A musky, almost unbreatheable smell seemed to fill the room like a cloud of smoke. “They popped this right off, no need for a cutting utensil or pliers.” He narrowed his eyes and sniffed it while John began attempting to gently console the client who was making a face as if suppressing vomit. “When was this delivered to you?” he asked. 

Swallowing hard, she answered, “This morning. That’s why I came to you.” She kept speaking as Sherlock hopped out from the chair and began to pace, severed finger in hand, her eyes following him as he moved. “It was…dirty rags at first, his tie, a watch, but now…”

“How long?”

“What?”

He repeated, “How long have you been receiving your dead husband’s items?” She twitched a little at the word _dead_. He didn’t look at her. 

Her lips seemed to tremble. “God, I think…months. Two months. I didn’t know what they were at first. Just…cloth in a box, I thought it was some horrible joke…” She averted her eyes away from Sherlock. He was inspecting the bone with large, investigative eyes. 

“It’s been exposed to water, probably recently. Has it rained where you are, near where your husband is buried? Have you gotten any water on it?” The woman shook her head and he purred, “ _Interesting._ ”

Walking behind her and snatching up her wrist, he placed the finger into her open palm. John clenched his eyes shut and squeezed the bridge of his nose. The woman’s face was pale. Sherlock meandered thoughtfully about the room and instructed her to leave the name of the cemetery where her husband was buried. He and John would investigate the site and return with any information. While folding up the rotting extremity inside the paper with shaking hands, she seemed surprised that their meeting was ending so soon. Sherlock felt as if he should have been annoyed, but for some reason he wasn’t. 

She left, quiet as a rodent through grass, and Sherlock was quietly buzzing with excitement.

John was wiping the drops of tea off the table with a rag, cup and saucer in his other hand. “I think I’m always going to have to be the one who’s apologizing for you,” he said, his voice soft enough that he may have been talking to no one but himself.  
“Somebody is opening up that grave,” Sherlock said, speaking as if he hadn’t heard John at all. “More than once. Why not just dig up the corpse once and take an item to send to the widow?” He stood in front of the window, his index finger moving pensively over his bottom lip. On the pavement below the red-haired client with the decaying finger in her purse emerged from their building and disappeared around a corner. “Unless they didn’t realize they were going to need more than one to send.” 

The dishes clinked in the sink like ice in a glass. John filled them with water from the tap but didn’t wash them. “How about we no longer let widowed clients know that I’m flirting with them?”

“How about we only talk about things that aren’t astonishingly less important than this case.”

John made a gentle sound between a laugh and a sigh. “Obviously you’re a grouch from sleeping more than two hours.”

Sherlock stabbed his arms into the sleeves of his jacket. “Fluke. My sleep cycles are incredibly hard to predict. Do you want to go to the gravesite or not?”

Exhaling through his nose, John grabbed his jacket off the back of the kitchen chair. The faucet drip, drip, dripped into the overflowing teacup.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only a few people have read this so far, so I hope those few people enjoy this.

The air had cooled and the pale yellow sun that had warmed the midday earth was blanketed by steely grey clouds. The tombstones seemed fixed in the soil like massive stone teeth plucked from the mouth of a giant, a monstrous thing, and stuck in the dirt so that the landscape grinned with stony decay. They found the grave site quickly, trekking through the forest of babies’ corpses, headstones of lovers and fathers, murderers and the murdered, and came upon where the client’s husband lay buried. The grave was modest, a simple slab of slate in the earth like a stone in a path. The dirt above the burial site was dark and packed tightly into the ground. Wisps of grass grew sparsely over the spot. Thin hairs on a rotting skull. 

Sherlock stood at the edge of where the grass of the cemetery turned to dark soil like a man standing on the edge of a building. He made a tutting sound with his tongue. “Don’t you pine for the days when criminals actually tried to remain subtle?” he mused. “One would think they’d desire a pride in their work.”

John was fiddling with his camera, his eyes narrowed against a soft but cold breath of wind. The tips of his fingers, up to the first knuckle, were red. “Well, I see what you mean about the grave being tampered with.” He nodded in the direction of the dark soil. 

“A child could see that, but it’s reassuring to know you possess some observational skills.” Sherlock squatted down by the grave. John rolled his eyes and snapped a picture of the scene. The grave was illuminated in a harsh flash of light. “It’s been disturbed multiple times. They’ve tried to cover their work by planting grass seed. Idiots,” he sneered. “What’s the point of planting grass if you’re just going to dig up the area again?”

John snapped another picture. “Why bother sending a widow the limbs of her husband? That seems more curious than some poorly planted grass.”

Sherlock rolled a bit of dirt between his fingers. White ovals of seed mixed with the earth. He let them fall to the ground. “John, if you were any simpler I’d have to water you twice a day.”

“Love you too, Sherlock.”

“Talk like that and people will think we’re in love.”

“They already do.” John shifted his weight to his other leg as he scanned over the pictures on his camera. “Do you think this is related to something the husband did while he was alive? A debt he hasn’t paid or…?”

The detective shook his head as he rose to his feet. His coat swished against the back of his legs like a tail. “No. The target is the woman. If they wanted money it would be much clearer than this. It’s a waste of resources to repeatedly dig up a grave and plant over it if all they want is an owed debt from a woman who would probably splinter if she dropped sugar into her tea too quickly. They’re frightening her because they can.”

“It’s personal then,” John offered. “It must be. No one just scares someone by digging up their husband.”

Sherlock spun on his heel and flashed a smile that John would have interpreted as friendly if he hadn’t known better. “Fair observation.” It was the closest thing to a compliment John had ever received. Sherlock walked around to the opposite end of the grave. “Be careful about that ‘nobody’ business, though.” He gestured to the grave site with an erratic zigzag motion of his fingers. “Get photographs of this area, I’m going to search around the rest of this graveyard.” 

John made a displeasured face, but Sherlock was already gone. 

The mausoleum stood hunched like a woman in rags on the edge of the property where the land turned from cemetery to thick bundles of deep green trees, with tentacles of jade ivy seeming to come from the depths of the forest and hold the morbid structure in its evergreen grasp, threatening to pull it in and engulf it in a sea of leaves. Sherlock had seen it in the distance, cowering behind the foliage like a frightened animal, and as he approached it the building seemed to shed some of its fearfulness and reveal itself to him, poking at his hungry curiosity with a gnarled finger. A bird sang sweetly somewhere beyond the cemetery.

Sherlock wrapped his fists around the bars of the iron gate into the structure and shook them. It was locked. He peered into the building but saw nothing but mold, dried flower petals, the darkened outline of what may have been a coffin. The interior was as black as pitch. He pulled a torch from his pocket and clicked it on, scanning it over the stony tomb. Sherlock saw nothing but heard, very faintly, a ripping and tearing sound coming from the very back of the structure, like a child pulling fistfuls of grass, root and all, from its place in the dirt with their fat, careless hands. 

He pulled a thin piece of metal from the inside pocket of his jacket and bent over the lock, sliding it inside the keyhole and prodding at the mechanism inside. Sherlock had taught himself how to pick locks when he was fifteen, first to break into the closet where his school held chemistry materials, second to unlock the door to his brother’s room. The skill immediately became invaluable. Almost every one of his cases, and the occasional activity of personal interest, required him to break into something. The lock clicked open and the metal gate screamed across the stone floor as he pulled it open enough to slide through.

Inside he was immediately hit with the wet stench of decay. With a cough, he filled his hand with a bundle of his scarf and covered his mouth and nose with it. He heard it echoing from the back of the tomb, tiny cracks and tears and gushing sounds like a symphony of gore reflecting off of the cold walls. Sherlock took a step forward. His toe crunched the skeletal corpse of a leaf and somewhere in the mausoleum the tearing sound stopped. Torch still in hand, he moved the light over the interior. Beside the casket something trembled. The wet crunching started again. 

Sherlock stepped forward and peered beside the casket. A small grey cat jerked its head upward, taking with it a jaw-full of red from the belly of what Sherlock could only imagine was its own kitten. There was a pile of them, as if they’d been left there specifically to be eaten, lying one on top of one another stiff and motionless, and the cat tore at them, chewing big, gaping mouthfuls of the tiny creatures. They had the same face, the same black striped markings from eyes to nose to mouth, a river of oil tears, as the hungry mother who clutched the rope of their intestines in her jaws and gnawed. Had she birthed them there? he wondered. Had she labored in the corner of this tomb, next to a human corpse, and while they were still blind and squirming and coated in the red vomit of afterbirth had she snapped their necks between her teeth? No, no she hadn’t; he looked them over and he could tell by their size, their colors, the fact that some of them lay with their eyelids peeled back across the giant milky orbs in their skulls that they were born, they had lived at least a few weeks in the presence of their mother’s love, and like a shepherd she had guided her trusting infants into the corner of a stony mausoleum and killed them there, killed them all there. The cat purred softly. 

Sherlock took a step back and twig snapped beneath his heel. The cat looked up at him, her eyes shining bright against the glare of his torch, the fur of her mouth matted and red and dripping. Her expression cracked and a sound emerged from her like a great siren, rising up and swelling within the confines of the tomb as an incredible shriek. Sherlock walked backwards, unable to look away from the gaping, screaming mouth of the animal, until his back touched the gate. He slipped himself through the thin opening he’d made and stepped back out into the cemetery. The cat never once blinked.

“Sherlock?”

The detective twitched. He turned around. “Um- what?”

John looked from the black camera in his hands to Sherlock. “I don’t know how long you expected me to take pictures of a single grave. What’s in there?” He nodded to the tomb. Sherlock suddenly realized that the screaming had stopped. 

“Oh…nothing. I thought perhaps the criminals had visited other parts of the cemetery, but it doesn’t look as if that’s the case.” He clicked off the torch and placed it back in his pocket. “They’re working in haste, coming back every few days or weeks to dig up the corpse, remove something from it, and then rebury the body. This cemetery is relatively isolated, but certainly the sounds of excavation would draw attention, even in the middle of the night. Not to mention the grave is filled spectacularly. Almost professional.”

John asked, “How do you know they haven’t just removed the body from the casket and the buried the box down there? They could have the husband stored up in some freezer somewhere.”

Sherlock shook his head. “No, rate of decomposition occurs four times slower underground than above. The corpse is old, but judging by the state of the appendage it’s still holding together relatively well. The body is being kept underground when bits of it aren’t being removed. The state of the dirt and the grass seed suggest this process has occurred more than once, and recently. I need to get a look at the body.”  
“And how are we supposed to do that?”

“Well, they certainly gave us a great example.”

It was John’s turn to shake his head. “We need a warrant to exhume the body, you know how long that can take. And Scotland Yard would do their best to get into our investigation, especially with something like this.” He seemed to look around the graveyard. At nothing, at everything. 

Sherlock retorted, “I don’t exactly _need_ a warrant.”

“I’m not illegally digging up a corpse with you, sorry.”

“You say that now.” Sherlock sighed through his nose. “I have plenty to work with for now, but I’ll need to speak with our client again. I assume you’re hungry?”

John smiled a little. “Of course.”

As they turned towards the direction of the main road, Sherlock felt an emotional tugging in the centre of his chest. He walked a few steps behind John before turning around again and approaching the black gate to the mausoleum. He pressed his ear up against the bars. It was silent inside. Quickly, he removed the torch from his pocket and squeezed his body halfway through the open gate, clicking the item on and pointing it in the corner where the feasting cat had howled like a banshee, unblinking as a medusa. He inhaled hard through his nose, trying to catch the faintest scent of death. He smelled nothing. Just dust, standing water, old rose petals on the casket. There was no sign of the cat and her children.

-

John chose a diner they had never visited before on a busy road several blocks down from the cemetery. The sky had darkened further and threatened to open on them, drenching them in rain. They sat across from one another in a booth. The waitress was somewhat pretty- tall, thin, dark hair; John’s type to a T- and John smiled pleasantly at her, his voice making sweet climbs and dips as he ordered his tea, his bread. Sherlock looked her over before declining to order anything.

“Don’t bother with her,” he said when she left, reorganizing the order of his silverware. “She’s eleven years younger than you and dropped out of uni when she was twenty due to an unplanned pregnancy that she ended up miscarrying. She’s physically sound now, but has a host of emotional problems. Her boyfriend doesn’t even know about her lover.”

John made a slight face but ignored the commentary. “Did you eat today?”

“You’ve been in my presence almost every moment since I awoke this morning, what do you think?”

“Did you eat yesterday?”

“Too busy. In lieu of exhuming the body we should observe the burial site at night when the perpetrators return- and they will.” The waitress returned with John’s tea and he smiled at her again though, Sherlock noted, with slightly less false hope flickering across his features. Sherlock tried to smile but cringed instead. She walked away and he continued, “Best case scenario we catch them in the act and the case is solved, worst case we eventually unearth the body ourselves and solve the case based on what we find there.”

Making a sound of disagreement into his tea, John answered, “No, I’ve told you, I’m not interested in pulling a dead man out of the ground. Although I’m also not too keen on spending several nights waiting outside a cemetery when I have to work at the clinic in the morning.”

“Your day job is boring, this is far more exciting.”

“Day job pays rent.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. There was a dull ache between his brows. John’s food arrived and the smell turned up a small ocean of sick waves inside his stomach. John’s teeth were the mother cat’s, biting and tearing, blood and tea and organ and bread. Baby kitten heart and lung, meat and vegetable. 

He averted his gaze and looked out the window behind John. He lowered his brows. “What is that?” he asked. 

Mouth full, John turned and looked. There was a shop across the street and through the dirty, almost brown, windows piles of books were visible nearly stacked to the ceiling and seeming to occupy almost every available space. Where there weren’t books there were dream catchers with long dangling feathers, candles, a bronze statue of Shiva with his leg and arms raised in dance. Swallowing, John answered, “Oh, hm, I think that’s some sort of…new age shop.” Sherlock tilted his head but said nothing so John continued, “Sort of like, well, astrology and tarot cards and the like.”

The corner of Sherlock’s mouth twitched. “Alternative religion for the middle class? Wasn’t aware that London was teeming with Pagans.”

John shrugged. “Takes all sorts. You’d be surprised.”

“I doubt it. Are you about finished? I’d like to speak to our client once more before the day’s end.”

“ _No._ Why don’t you just call her?” 

The smell of the diner had somehow dislodged the scent of death from within Sherlock’s nostrils. Those wet little carcasses could have been under the table, in his lap. “Tedious. I’d rather see her face. Makes it easier to tell when someone is lying or hiding something.”

John made a sound of exasperation. “Give me five minutes. Christ.”

The two of them took a cab to a place just outside the city where their client lived. During the drive Sherlock thought about mentioning the stench, which still hadn’t vaporized, to John, but thought against it. Small, humble, and quaint, the one story home was unremarkable in every sense of the word. Sherlock rapped his knuckles on the door and the woman opened it. She seemed to twitch in surprise at the sight of them.

“Oh. Detectives. What can I do for you?” She held onto the door as if ready to slam it shut. 

John answered, “We just need a bit more information.”

Sherlock somehow managed to push past her and squeeze through the door into the house. “Sorry for not calling,” he said, sounding not even slightly sorry. “Needed to take a bit of a look around.” He inhaled through his nose as he looked over the areas visible from where the stood. The smell, it was there again, only this time it was more pungent. A smell like sewage and shit and hair lit on fire. John and their client seemed entirely unaffected. Sherlock swallowed the urge to gag and pointed to a room visible through an open door. “Whose room is that?” he asked, and he silently hoped that the rising sense of disgust wasn’t pushing its way through his voice. 

She answered softly, twiddling her fingers. “It’s my daughter’s…was my daughter’s.” She elaborated, “She moved into a flat with some girlfriends several months ago.”

Sherlock stepped into the bedroom doorway. The room was fully furnished. The walls were painted a deep plum color. Posters of musicians and celebrity crushes, black and white photographic strips of friends in a photo booth, magazines, a few DVDs. Ordinary. Incredibly ordinary. 

“Have you told her about the items you’re receiving from your husband?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, no, I…I can’t tell her that. Not right now. I don’t even know what these people want.”

Something inside Sherlock churned. The smell was not just in his nose, but the entirety of his skull now. Cat piss and rubbish and road kill and no one was gagging or retching or noticing the rancid odor creeping out of every inch of the house. He swayed where he stood. John may have said his name quietly.

“We’ll keep in touch with you,” he said, maybe slurred, as he headed for the door. For some reason he added, “Don’t do anything stupid.” John was saying something to her but Sherlock didn’t hear it. 

Out on the grass, in front of where their cab was parked and rumbling lowly, Sherlock’s stomach heaved and he vomited onto the lawn. For two days his stomach had been empty and all that came out was a gush of water, stomach acid, bits and pieces of something disgusting and unidentifiable. Doubled over, he hiccupped, retched again, and the vomit came, thicker this time so that he had to spit it off his lips like chewing tobacco. 

John was standing next to him. “Sherlock? What’s going on?”

He groaned. “Can’t you smell it?! Can’t anyone smell that...that fucking stench? God…!”

“I don’t know what-”

“How can you not smell it?! Are you daft? Are you simple?” Sherlock spit something onto the grass. “God, it’s like death. It smells just like death.” 

John took Sherlock by the arm and aided him into the cab. He said softly that he didn’t smell anything, that there was nothing there. Sherlock leaned against the door of the cab, his face sweating, his stomach feeling tight and empty. If John was talking his voice was lost in the throbbing beat inside the depths of his ears. Sherlock thought of the graveyard, he thought of the scared woman and her dead husband and his severed finger; he thought of the cat and her dead babies, and he thought of his own vomit fertilizing their client’s lawn. The sky was dark. It had begun to rain. By the time they returned to their flat on Baker Street the smell had completely vanished.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock begins to experience some unsavoury symptoms. Even he must admit some queer happenings are taking place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Natalie, where's the Johnlock?" you cry.  
> "Hold your damn horses, it'll get here when it gets here," I retort.

Rain pecked at the windows like the little fingers of children. Sherlock’s face was damp and his tongue was a cotton pad inside his mouth. The clicking of his fingers on the keys of his laptop was a plastic melody over the steady percussion of the rain. John had set a cup of tea beside him and Sherlock looked at it with a sour stomach. He turned back to his computer screen.

“Her daughter didn’t move into a flat with her friends. All of her furniture is still in the home along with all her personal belongings. She’s either still living there (doubtful) or is staying with someone temporarily, most likely a family member, some aunt she’s been shipped off to. Queer thing to lie about, and not a very good one, either.” His mind buzzed with possibilities. 

John countered, “Maybe she isn’t lying.” He added, sounding unconvinced at his own suggestion. “Maybe she’s still moving.”

Sherlock laughed under his breath as if John was so simple. “They’re always lying. Why is the more important question.”

“Maybe I’m not as cynical as you are. Will you drink your tea?”

“Don’t mother me. It’s patronising.” Sherlock thought to himself that John could use a good dash of cynicism. The thought felt corrosive in his brain but he made no effort to stop it. 

John was looking over the paper, not even really reading it. “I wouldn’t have to if you managed to feed yourself.”

“Please,” Sherlock sneered, and something small but angry trembled inside him. “You enjoy it. That pedestrian desire to coddle is the reason you became a physician in the first place, no doubt. I’m awaiting the day you spawn and decide tending to a wailing infant is more satisfying than anything you’ve ever done here.” He said the word as if it tasted like rotten mean on his tongue, positively spit it.

John’s hands clenched the paper and it crinkled audibly beneath his fingers. He may have grit his teeth. “You’re being intolerable.”

Sherlock shuddered and snapped, “Piss off. Do you know what’s _intolerable?_ ” John had a feeling he was going to find out whether he wanted to or not. “Working with an adult who still believes that people are mostly good and don’t work solely for their own self interest. We investigate murders, thefts, drug cartels, women with post-partum depression who put their babies in meat grinders- I’m sure you remember that one, she only tried to stab you in the neck when I found the infant’s hand at the bottom of the garbage disposal--”

“I was _just_ trying to play devil’s advocate,” he said, flattening the paper on his lap. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I don’t need a devil’s advocate! I need a partner I can rely on to assist me! That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” He slammed his fists on the table and the tea sloshed inside the cup like waves in the blackness of a stormy ocean. Something about him was frantic. “In her bedroom the dresser was so stuffed with clothing that the drawer didn’t shut properly-- one would think that someone might take their clothing with them if they moved. And, what, do you expect me to believe that she’s so sentimental that she’d burden her living space with pictures of her loved ones and not take a single one with her? _Please._ ” Sherlock was gesticulating, wild and animated, his sharp features sneering and angry. He stood so quickly that the chair beneath him almost tumbled to the ground. “The bed wasn’t even made- dear god, do people even _try_ anymore?” His back to John now, Sherlock’s hand came up to his mouth thoughtfully, index finger over his lips, thumb under his chin. John couldn’t see his expression but he imagined that it was cold and intense: his dark brows lowered, his eyes making tiny shifting movements as the cogs of his mind whirred and churned. The great machine. 

The room was buzzing with something dirty and suffocating. Sherlock looked like a statue of ebony, carved from obsidian, draped in shadow. John rose from his seat, his mostly-cold cup of tea held in his hand. “Well,” he announced, sounding resigned, “it’s not my responsibility to deal with you when you’re in a mood.”

Sherlock turned his head towards him sharply, the hand on his mouth curling, joints bent until the extremity was a claw, his features suddenly contorted with his teeth grit and his eyes large, body stiff. “A mood,” he chuckled, and his teeth showed themselves as his mouth pulled into a grin, darkly amused. “Why don’t you do us both a favour and fuck off?” His voice was low, almost a whisper, trembling and barely containing something that might have been rage, might have been something else. His aristocratic stoicism seemed to fall away for that moment and he wasn’t Sherlock The Detective, Sherlock The Genius, but Sherlock The Starving Animal. John’s lips parted slightly, eyes wide with shock. Sherlock looked so incredibly predatory. 

And then, as fast as it had come, it was gone, and all at once Sherlock seemed to regain himself. His eyes softened and darted about with something resembling disbelief. A breath that was almost a pant left him. He stammered, “John, I didn’t--”

John set his cup in the kitchen. When he emerged again and spoke his voice was flat. “Actually eat something and go to bed. Maybe you’ll shake off…” He shook his hand vaguely. “…whatever this is.” He climbed the stairs to his bedroom and disappeared. Sherlock wanted to say something but, much to his terrible surprise, didn’t know what. 

\- 

At some point in the night Sherlock rested his head on his keyboard and fell asleep. He dreamt that he lifted a piece of wood, so wet and rotten that it crumbled in his hands and beneath it was the pile of baby cats, this time alive and mewling and crawling over one another like a twisting bundle of worms. Their eyes were too big, bulging from their skulls, looking up at him, the cats opening their wet mouths at him and crying out. He looked at them with the same revulsion and terror as if they were a nest of centipedes. And then he was grabbing a heavy rock and bringing it down over and over, cracking it over the skulls and bodies of those squirming animals until they splintered and shattered like bloody toothpicks. He brought his hand up and- ah!- in a single blink he was crushing the face of their client, smashing her nose flat, collapsing the eye socket, her skull splitting open and the grey brain forcing itself through the crack like a monster emerging through a crevice in the earth. Her blood was on his face, mixing with the kitten blood, on his teeth, in his black hair, all over his fingers. Once more his hand curled around the rock, and John looked back at him, blue eyes large and soft, mouth gently parted. The stone was raised to its zenith in Sherlock’s hand and his breath caught in his throat.

“John?”

John’s expression cracked into a massive, splitting grin and his fists shot up and grasped Sherlock’s collar as he cried, _“Do it!”_ And with a roar like an animal, he did. 

Sherlock awoke with his face on his keyboard and his head bathed in the white light of his laptop screen. The room was dark. He blinked slowly, stupidly. His mouth and the lower half of the left side of his face were wet with saliva. At some point during his sleep his arms had fallen off of the desk and they dangled there now, limp and loose, his body so weak and languid that he couldn’t bring them up again, couldn’t lift his head. There was a pressure on his back like a firm hand pressing down and crushing his chest against the desk on which he had been sleeping. He gasped and the sound stuck on the back of his tongue so that it was a desperate, suffocating croak. His mouth wrenched open and he tried to call out, his voice lost in a creaking gasp. His voice wouldn’t come, couldn’t come, and only his eyes rolled in their sockets, looking around wildly at nothing. He thought to himself with mild horror that he was no longer dreaming, that this was terribly real, and he was having some sort of epileptic seizure on his keyboard and if he couldn’t move or take a breath soon then John would find him drowned on his own spit and vomit.

Sherlock tried to arch his back away from his chair but the big, invisible hands that seemed to lock him in place allowed for nothing but a pathetic jerking convulsion inside his seat. He felt as if his spirit had become dislodged from his body, like he was a soul desperately trying to escape a corpse. The body twisted and tightened, turning in on itself, and inside his head he cried out for John, for their landlady, for anyone, his mouth a gaping, soundless chasm. The ghost in the machine screamed. 

The hand between his shoulder blades seemed to produce a body, birthing a black form from itself like a shadow growing across a wall. He felt that thing lean over him, press itself against him, hold something like its ear to his back as if to listen to the violent drumming of his heart through his spine. Sherlock trembled, and his shoes tapped against the floor with his violent convulsions of fear. The shadow tore a mouth for itself, and when it spoke, he spoke—as though the thing had snaked its hand into the back of his head and inserted part of itself into his brain. They were one; it the brain and Sherlock the appendage. When they spoke, they spoke simultaneously and identically, his low, sonorous voice a baritone harmony beneath the electric insect buzz of the voice above him:

“I’m here now.”

Then, all at once, he was back again. The pressure released him and his body was his own again. As if he had been submerged in water, Sherlock took a massive breath and slammed his palm upon the table, arms collapsing under his weight, feeling boneless. He panted heavily there, face and clothes drenched in sweat. When he moved to stand his legs wobbled, his knees buckled, and he tumbled to the ground. He scrambled to his feet, limbs everywhere, and turned on every light he could find, flooding the flat with brightness. There was no one, nothing, not a single fleeting shadow, in any corner of their home, not behind all of his bookshelves, not beneath his desk or tucked away in the kitchen. He strained against the window and found it locked. Sherlock even dashed down the flight of steps to the main floor of the building to listen for darting footsteps and heard only the sounds of London after dark through the walls. 

Sherlock didn’t sleep for the remainder of the night. He lay perfectly still on the sofa, long legs extended over the armrest, hands folded over his chest like Bela Lugosi in a coffin, eyes gazing at the ceiling. For a while he retreated into his brain and swept through the tediously organised library of his mind, his encyclopaedia of knowledge presenting itself to him with perfect mental clarity. From the shelves he pulled big, leather-bound books of psychology, long articles about sleep disorders crushed between their heavy covers, research from years and years ago about epilepsy and parasites of the brain that he had stored away, perfectly organised. Sherlock’s mind was a faultless labyrinth of seemingly limitless knowledge. At some point he emerged from his Mind Palace and back into consciousness as if floating to the surface of a lake, wet beads of his meditative state rolling from his skin, dark hair floating about his head in a halo of blackness. Beneath the water almost three decades of insight swam about him like flower-coloured koi. Within him and apart from him. 

It wasn’t until the morning came and the sun was a fiery tangerine ball that sent dark, dramatic shadows through the window and John dragged his bare feet across the floor that Sherlock heard any sign of a human other than himself. He broke from his reverie with a little gasp, as if he had just discovered something so brilliant.

“Why make the transition from cloth to limb?” he asked, and John twitched in surprise. The question sounded like the set-up to a pun. 

John made a stupid sound and answered, “What--? Oh, I don’t know—are you actually asking me this or are you just using me to think aloud?” The sentence was only halfway finished before Sherlock had begun speaking again, brows furrowing, features twitching, talking to no one but the ceiling:

“It’s a bit more eye-catching, isn’t it? A tie, a watch—who cares? Those could belong to anyone and they’re not trying to pester this woman about just anyone.” John may have chided him for considering a limb in a box pestering, but Sherlock flexed his steepled fingers against his chin and rambled on. “Oblivious woman! She sees nothing, notices nothing, no wonder they got fed up and sent something big instead.” He swung his legs off the sofa then tucked his feet beneath him, sitting in a queer squat on the cushion, looking like a gargoyle. “Perhaps they should have sent his head first, she may have come to us sooner.”

“Let’s be thankful they didn’t,” John said, putting the kettle on the burner. “Were you up all night?” His voice still held shards of curtness and in between more vital thoughts Sherlock wondered what he was so angry about. 

He answered shortly, “Had a bout of sleep paralysis. Pour me some tea.”

John made a sound like an angry cat but the kettle screeched and he did it anyway. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“Did you get your degree online? Disruption of REM sleep patterns- or at least the psychiatric research suggests this, who knows? Psychiatrists are just children in lab coats playing scientist, disgraceful- which causes paralysis of the muscles upon falling asleep or wakening.” His index fingers were beneath his chin, thumbs pressed together so that his hand bore the semblance of a pistol under his skull. Bang, bang. “Interesting hallucinations, though. Usually you have to pay for those.”

The water in their cups was darkening from the tea bags, a translucent earth colour escaping them as if through a wound. “I’m a physician, not a psychiatrist,” John retorted. “You had hallucinations? And that doesn’t concern you at all?”

Sherlock left his spot on the sofa and retrieved his tea in a single swift motion, curling his hand around the cup and spinning on his heel to pace around the room. The string attached to the tea bag was still pinched between John’s fingers and it flopped over the lip of the cup and onto the counter like a disembowelled organ, bloated and wet. John’s features twitched. “Sometimes things happen in isolation,” Sherlock answered. “That’s the way the world works. Certainly there’s a reason for it- neurological, almost definitely- but it’s not important.”

Taking a sip of his tea, John asked, “Well, what did you hallucinate?” He added and didn’t know why, “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Nothing important.” Sherlock was walking about, making a big oval around the coffee table, stepping over piles of books, looping around the brass orrery. “I had the distinct sensation that there was an individual in the room with me, but there was no one, of course.” For some reason his voice was sharp with bitterness. Before he could even stop himself, he was saying, “I felt as if they were speaking for me. Or I was speaking for them. And then it disappeared.”

“Spooky,” John replied, acutely aware that Sherlock wasn’t drinking the tea he had demanded. And he added, “Maybe it was a ghost”, simply because he knew it would drive a stake of annoyance through Sherlock’s chest. A vampire killed by illogic. 

Snarling expectedly, Sherlock snapped, “Don’t be foolish. Neurons firing uncontrollably, you can see, hear, and believe anything. Even a brain like mine malfunctions occasionally.” He swallowed a mouthful of tea heavily and John no longer had the desire to pour the boiling water over his head. Sherlock’s expression soured momentarily as if he had just then realised what he had suggested. 

“Maybe it is a ghost and that’s why you’ve been such an intolerable prick as of late.” John hurriedly finished his tea and set the cup in the sink. He tugged on the collar of his sleep shirt, very much not wanting to change into his work clothes. “Or maybe you’re possessed,” he offered, deadpan. 

A tremor ran through the detective and for just a moment John thought that he might lose himself again and throw his cup against the wall, tea and glass everywhere like a skull crushed beneath a boot. Blood and bone. He regained himself. “I’m going to do some background research on this daughter today. I feel she might be more important than I initially thought.” He drank his tea. John didn’t know whether or not to be worried. 

John dressed himself for the clinic and gathered his paperwork in his briefcase. Sherlock was still wearing his clothes from the day before. His muscles ached. The centre of his brain was white hot, as dense as a dying star. John may have- probably did- say goodbye as he left, but Sherlock was standing in the middle of the sitting room, eyes unfocused, fingers tracing lazy, contemplative circles around his mouth. He thought about the woman and her dead husband; he thought about police databases and missing people, and he thought about blood splatters and decomposition; and at some point he was thinking about John and the Shadowed Thing and the fingers that plugged into his brain. The koi swam in lazy rings about his head. The bubbles that came from their babbling mouths floated to the surface and popped their voices into the air. _I’m here now, I'm here now, I am here._


End file.
